| Genghis Khan was not one to agonize
over gender roles. He was into sex and power, and he didn't mind saying so. "The
greatest joy a man can know is to conquer his enemies and drive them before
him." The emperor once thundered. Genghis Khan conquered two thirds of the known
world during the early 13th century and he may have set an all-time record for
what biologists call reproductive success. An account written 33 years after his
death credited him with 20,000 descendants. Men's manners have improved markedly since Genghis Khan's day. At heart, though, we're the same animals we were 800 years ago, which is to say we are status seekers. We may talk of equality and fraternity. We may strive for classless societies. But we go right on building hierarchies, and jockeying for status within them. Can we abandon the tendency? Probably not. As scientists are now discovering, status seeking is not just a habit or a cultural tradition. It's a design feature of the male psyche--a biological drive that is rooted in the nervous system and regulated by hormones and brain chemicals. How do we know this relentless one-upmanship is a biological endowment? Anthropologists find the same pattern virtually everywhere they 10ok and so do zoologists. Male competition is fierce among crickets, crayfish and elephants, and it's ubiquitous among higher primates, for example, male chimpanzees have an extraordinarily strong drive for dominance. Coincidence? Evolutionists don't think so. From their perspective, life is essentially a race to repro-duke, and natural selection is bound to favor different strategies in different organisms. In reproductive terms, they have vastly more to gain from it. A female can't flood the gene pool by commandeering extra mates; no matter how much sperm she attracts, she is unlikely to produce more than a dozen viable offspring. But as Genghis Khan's exploits make clear, males can profit enormously by out mating their peers. It's not hard to see how that dynamic, played out over millions of years, would leave modern men fretting over status. We're built from the genes that the most determined competitors passed down. Fortunately, we don't aspire to families of 800. As monogamy and contraceptives may have leveled the reproductive playfield, power has become its own psychological reward. Those who achieve high status still enjoy more sex with more partners than the rest of us, and the reason is no mystery. Researchers have consistently found that women favor signs of "earning capacity" over good looks. For sheer sex appeal, a doughy (脸色苍白的) bald guy in a Rolex will outscore a stud (非常英俊的男子) in a Burger King uniform almost every time. |